The pressure to reach for a gun to help save one animal from another is stronger than ever. And it has triggered a conservation problem from hell.

By Warren Cornwall

We usually think conservation means saving animals. But its history is tinged with blood. John Audubon, a patron saint of the American conservation movement, killed hundreds of birds, partly for sport and partly for specimens to pose for his paintings. Aldo Leopold, a father of ecological science, endorsed killing wolves to increase deer populations.

Today, as climate change pushes animals into each other’s overlapping territories and humans drive ever more species to the brink of extinction, the pressure to reach for a gun to help save one animal from another is stronger than ever. In recent years, the federal government has shot Arctic foxes to guard the nests of rare Steller’s eider ducks. In Texas and Oklahoma, hunters blast cowbirds that take over the nests of endangered black-capped vireos. Sea lions have been put to death for the sake of salmon on the Northwest’s Columbia River. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plans to kill 16,000 double-crested cormorants in 2015 to help those same salmon. But the most controversial case may prove to be the northern spotted owl.

The spotted owl, an icon of the environmental movement, is a shy bird that favors ancient forests. Its declining numbers led to its listing under the Endangered Species Act, bringing a halt to most old-growth logging in Northwest federal forests in the early 1990s. Today, the migration of the barred owl from its original East Coast home poses a potentially fatal threat. Bigger and more aggressive than its smaller cousin, the barred owl has gradually pushed south in a seemingly inexorable wave since arriving in western Canada in the mid-twentieth century. Wherever it turns up in large numbers, spotted owls start to disappear. Biologists suspect spotted owls abandon their nests when they are driven off by the barred owl. In at least one case, a barred owl appeared to have killed and eaten a spotted owl.

Alarmed by the rapid decline of the remaining spotted owls, desperate biologists, federal bureaucrats, and environmentalists have hit upon a last-ditch, bloody scheme: shoot enough barred owls to create breathing room for spotted owls. Last winter, after years of studying the pros and cons of various approaches, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service embarked on a six-year experiment in four small parts of the Northwest (the initial four-year plan stretched to six, due to budget problems). Trained marksmen killed 71 barred owls in the first season, a number that could grow to as many as 3,600 owls over the span of the entire experiment. The tests are designed to show what it would take to really make a difference for the spotted owls. If the experiment is deemed a success, it could pave the way for death warrants for thousands of owls every year for decades, if not forever. It would be the largest known mass killing of raptors.

For bird lovers or for anyone with a soft spot for wild animals, this is a problem from hell. Nobody is happy with the options. Bob Sallinger, conservation director of the Audubon Society of Portland, summed it up neatly: “On the one hand, killing thousands of owls is completely unacceptable. On the other hand, the extinction of the spotted owl is completely unacceptable.”

The shootings have prompted an unusual amount of soul-searching. For the first time ever, the Fish and Wildlife Service—an agency with plenty of blood on its hands—convened people to grapple with the ethics of killing one animal for the sake of another. How should humans get involved in a fight between species? Step into the boots of people on the front lines of the owl wars. Would you open fire?

••

Finger on the Trigger

The first time Lowell Diller shot a barred owl, he almost couldn’t pull the trigger. He was standing in a grove of Douglas firs and redwoods outside the tiny northern California mill town of Korbel on a damp February afternoon in 2009.

He had lured the bird with a speaker perched on a stump, programmed to send out the barred owl’s haunting eight-note call: who-who, who-whooo . . . who-who, who-whooo. Now the female was perched just 30 meters away, an easy shot with his 20-gauge shotgun. Even in the fading light, he could see the distinctive white and brown stripes down its breast.

Diller had partly hoped no owl would answer his call. He raised the shotgun to his shoulder and tried to take aim. But he was shaking so badly, he feared he would miss. He lowered the gun, taking deep breaths and whispering to himself to calm down, to relax. He braced himself against a tree to steady the gun, told himself it was for the sake of science, and fired.

“It just fundamentally seemed so wrong to be shooting one of these birds,” said Diller, who recently retired from his job as a wildlife biologist with the Seattle-based Green Diamond Resource company. “You just don’t shoot raptors.”

Diller’s queasiness embodies the profound unease people are feeling in the Northwest. In the end, Diller weighed the options and chose what he felt was the lesser of two evils. Doing nothing, he feared, meant accepting the demise of the spotted owl. And that, for him, meant that the killing experiment was worthwhile. If someone needed to do the dirty work, Diller felt he shouldn’t ask someone else to take that job. Since that first day, he has shot 96 barred owls. It hasn’t gotten much easier.

This past spring, he and a handful of marksmen finished the first season of the experiment. They called it quits around the time eggs hatched, because they didn’t want to orphan chicks. The Fish and Wildlife Service draws the line at leaving young birds to slowly starve. This underscores the odd ways ethics can pop up in wildlife management. The shooters will be back in the fall, trying to kill those same owls.

••

The Fate of a Species Trumps that of the Individual

How many barred owls would you kill to save a spotted owl? One? A hundred? A thousand? The calculus is straightforward for Dave Werntz: as many as it takes. Werntz is the science and conservation director for the environmental group Conservation Northwest, based in Bellingham, Washington. He sees the spotted owl as a rare, native species threatened by a new arrival that will likely survive quite well even if thousands are killed every year. So he supports an even more ambitious killing program than the one that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering. He likens owl removal to pulling a weed. “I don’t see the barred owl as much different [from] addressing Himalayan blackberry or other domineering species that are impacting our landscape,” he said.

His life has been intertwined with northern spotted owls for more than a quarter-century. In the late 1980s, he wandered the forests of southwest Washington, hooting like an owl. He was working for the U.S. Forest Service, counting spotted owls and tracking where they nested. It was the peak of the Northwest’s legendary timber wars, a time when protesters chained themselves to logging equipment to save vestiges of old-growth forest, loggers burned spotted owls in effigy, and federal courts took control of much of the region’s public timberlands—in part to protect the owl.

Repelled by clearcuts, and fascinated with the owls and old-growth forests, Werntz went back to school. He studied under University of Washington ecologist Jerry Franklin, a pioneer of a new understanding of the richness of old-growth forests. Werntz has been on the front lines of the fight over the owls ever since. In the 1990s, Werntz worked with environmental groups to push for stronger owl protections. Later he toiled to stop the timber industry from rolling back logging restrictions.

The politically charged history of owls and old growth makes the case of the barred owl even more fraught with controversy. Since humans destroyed spotted owl habitat and brought the species to this dire moment, Werntz believes people have an obligation to save the last remaining ones.

Nevertheless, Werntz frames the killing of barred owls as primarily a scientific matter, not a political or ethical one. This is a view commonly espoused by conservation scientists trained to think in terms of the fate of entire species rather than individual animals. While he doesn’t relish killing barred owls, Werntz sees it as necessary to protect a native species integral to the forests he loves. Biodiversity trumps squeamishness about bloodletting.

••

The Individual Matters

If you want to make a conservation biologist squirm, try this question: “How do you think the animal feels?” Scientists usually think in terms of populations and species. Individuals form the raw materials for the grand Darwinian drama of survival and evolution. Feelings are, by and large, beside the point.

But for some, the barred owl is a majestic creature endowed with animal intelligence—not a pest. Fish and Wildlife Service officials learned that at public meetings about the owl removal plan. They came to talk science. Many in the crowd spoke of how they felt about the owls as individuals.

Now a growing number of researchers are trying to bridge those two perspectives. They argue that the conventional approach to conservation risks ignoring the lives and experiences of wildlife—making for poor science and shaky ethics. Their new field, “compassionate conservation,” draws on a body of research documenting the cognitive and emotional lives of animals. Injured chickens self-medicate. Crustaceans learn to avoid pain, and they respond to stress in a way similar to that of vertebrates. And rats and dogs—even bees—are capable of pessimism. The more we learn about how animals think and feel, the more we empathize with them and the less we can ignore the suffering we inflict.

“The guiding principle of compassionate conservation is ‘First, do no harm,’ which means the life of each and every individual animal is valued,” writes Marc Bekoff in his “Animal Emotions” column at Psychology Today. Bekoff, a University of Colorado professor emeritus and animal behavior researcher, is a leading voice in the compassionate conservation field. “Trading off individuals of one species for the good of individuals of another species isn’t acceptable,” he says. That means no killing of barred owls.

Yet for many people, the owl dilemma falls into a gray area in which there is tension between the fate of the individual and the survival of a species.

Bill Lynn started out suspicious of the idea of shooting owls. An ethicist at Loyola Marymount University and Clark University in Massachusetts, he was hired by the Fish and Wildlife Service to run stakeholder meetings about the ethics of the lethal experiment. At first, he suspected the government’s killing program was a knee-jerk response that showed little regard for the animals. But the spotted owl’s dire situation changed his mind. He concluded that the experiments, if done as humanely as possible, would be a “sad good”—something unfortunate yet worth doing to help save a species. But he won’t endorse a region-wide war on barred owls until he sees how high the death toll would be.

••

What’s the Exit Strategy?

Even if we manage to negotiate the moral thicket of killing one owl to save another—and emerge at the other end with gun at the ready—we run headlong into a practical question: What’s the exit strategy? Can we kill 10,000 barred owls every year forever?

That’s the figure some experts in the field use when they talk about what it will take to truly help spotted owls recover in the Northwest. On the optimistic side, some (such as Diller and Werntz) believe that as Pacific Northwest forests continue to recover from logging and more owl habitat opens up, the killing could slow down or stop after a few decades. Others worry that new habitat will just fill up with even more barred owls, creating a never-ending killing operation.

“I think in the long run we simply can’t control barred owl populations on a large scale,” said Eric Forsman, a U.S. Forest Service wildlife biologist and pre-eminent spotted owl researcher. “It would be incredibly expensive and essentially you’d have to do it forever.”

To date, studies on the effectiveness of lethal barred owl removal have been limited in scope and scale. In small tests on private forestland in northern California, spotted owls returned to nearly all their former nest sites after people shot barred owls that had taken over, according to Diller, who took part in the experiment. Where barred owls were left alone, he said, spotted owl numbers continued to fall. Those results have yet to be published.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, for its part, hasn’t offered a long-term plan of attack. They’re awaiting the results of their six-year experiment. That experiment is expected to cost $4 million—more than $1,000 per dead bird. And it will cover only two percent of spotted owl habitat in Washington, Oregon, and northern California. The other 98 percent is the worrisome part.

The logistics alone are daunting. First, there’s the problem of finding enough qualified shooters. It’s tricky to tell the difference between a barred owl and a spotted owl. For the experiment, the government is relying on trained gunmen. But declaring open season on barred owls could be a recipe for unacceptable collateral damage.

Then there’s the politics. Even if it is technically feasible, will the public get behind an open-ended mass owl killing with no clear exit strategy? Kent Livezey, a retired Fish and Wildlife biologist, has his doubts. “Even if you got the public to agree the first year, you just need some photographer to go out with them and show a bunch of dead owls,” he said.

Livezey worked for years to save spotted owls, helping to craft the plan for their recovery. But he’s personally repelled by the shooting plan, and he bowed out of the owl work when it came time to devise the experiment. For him, there were just too many dead raptors, and the plan set a bad precedent for other clashes between wildlife. He would rather see people pick a fight that can be won. He imagines using guns to halt the advance of barred owls south into the territory of the California spotted owl, a species that’s not rare yet. But it also means leaving the northern spotted owl without armed bodyguards. “Personally, I would just let nature run its course,” he said.

——-

Warren Cornwall is an environmental and science journalist living in Bellingham, Washington

“Predators are bad for wildlife.” How often have Americans heard this refrain in public forums?

Pervasive as a belief in rural Western culture, it drives political discourse. It also is part of a nonstop feedback loop of social reinforcement, rife in barber shops, ammo stores, saloons, coffee klatches and outfitter camps.

But does it withstand scientific scrutiny? Do predators such as wolves and cougars “devastate” wildlife or do they help keep public game herds healthier?

Predator experts and others specializing in wildlife conservation medicine say it’s an important consideration when thinking about protocols for managing zoonotic diseases in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

I contacted biologist L. David Mech, one of the world’s foremost wolf authorities. He has written or contributed to hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers on wolves and prey.

“In the main, the preponderance of scientific evidence supports the view that wolves generally kill the old, the young, the sick and the weak,” Mech began. “There’s so much documented field data behind it.”

All the things humans treasure about every wild prey species — their physiology, agility and resilience — are reflections of the predators that made them adapt and evolve over eons.

Keeping domestic livestock healthy and fat often involves huge doses of antibiotics and, in some cases, growth hormones. Not so for free-ranging wildlife, especially wildlife not subjected to unnatural animal husbandry practices, such as artificially nourishing wild elk at crowded feedgrounds.

Mech made a fascinating point: Wolves appear to target sick animals that, to the human eye, exhibit no overt symptoms of disease.

“There’s a lot more going on than we can detect,” Mech said. “They are killing animals that most people would say, ‘That animal looks pretty healthy to me,’ but in fact it isn’t.”

In 2003, Denver Post reporter Theo Stein interviewed scientists about CWD spreading though deer and elk in Colorado. Dr. Valerius Geist, who paradoxically has become a darling of anti-wolfers, made this assertion about the significance of wolves in containing CWD spread via proteins called prions.

“Wolves will certainly bring the disease to a halt,” he said. “They will remove infected individuals and clean up carcasses that could transmit the disease.”

Stein added that “Geist and Princeton University biologist Andrew Dobson theorize that killing off the wolf allowed CWD to take hold in the first place.”

Wolves aren’t alone. In a 2009 study titled “Mountain lions prey selectively on prion-infected mule deer,” researchers in Colorado discovered that “adult mule deer killed by mountain lions were more likely to be prion-infected than were deer killed more randomly … suggesting that mountain lions were selecting for infected individuals when they targeted adult deer.”

Researchers said, “Other studies indicate that predators like wolves and coyotes select prey disproportionately if they appear impaired by malnutrition, age or disease.”

In another study researcher N. Thompson Hobbs examined the potential impact of wolves on CWD-infected elk in Rocky Mountain National Park, where lobos are now absent.

Wolves, he found, could reduce average life spans of infected elk and therefore limit the amount of time infectious animals could spread disease to others.

“We suggest that as CWD distribution and wolf range overlap in the future, wolf predation may suppress disease emergence or limit prevalence,” Hobbs said.
Wyoming doesn’t accept this scientific reality. In Jackson Hole, where unnatural feeding of wapiti on the National Elk Refuge is contributing to persistent brucellosis infection and putting migrating elk at high CWD risk, wolves are killed under the ironic guise of “keeping elk herds healthy.”

In Wyoming’s “predator zone” which encompasses many of the state’s 22 elk feedgrounds, wolves can be killed at any time of day year round.

Are Wyoming, Idaho and Montana spending millions in tax dollars to eliminate the natural allies that help keep wildlife diseases such as brucellosis and CWD in check? Mech stays out of the political fray, though he says the value of predators is clear.

“Based upon everything I’ve seen over the course of my career, I generally stand behind the assertion that wolves make prey populations healthier,” he said. “The evidence to support it is overwhelming.”

Todd Wilkinson’s column appears every week in the News&Guide. He is author of “Last Stand: Ted Turner’s Quest to Save a Troubled Planet.”

‘Ironically, they are vanishing just as we are learning about their important ecological effects’

– Sarah Lazare, staff writer

African Leopard in Etosha National Park, Namibia (Photo: Patrick Giraud / Wikimedia Creative Commons)A steep decline in large predators is threatening endangered species and disrupting ecosystems from the tropic to the arctic, scientists warn.

Over 75 percent of the 31 large carnivore species—including lions, dingoes, wolves, otters, and bears—face shrinking numbers, according to a Friday report in the journal Science. Of these, 17 species now live in less than half of the ranges they previously occupied.

Human extermination, as well as a reduction in habitat and prey, are creating “hotspots” of decline, found the scientists—who reviewed studies and singled out the ecological effects of 7 large predators facing steep decline. While southeast Asia, southern and eastern Africa and the Amazon face dwindling numbers, much of western Europe and the eastern United States have already exterminated the huge bulk of their large predators.

“Globally, we are losing our large carnivores,” said William Ripple, lead author of the paper and a professor in the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society at Oregon State University. “Many of them are endangered,” he said. “Their ranges are collapsing. Many of these animals are at risk of extinction, either locally or globally. And, ironically, they are vanishing just as we are learning about their important ecological effects.”

This decline is throwing off the balance of ecosystems across the globe, say the scientists.

The decrease of cougars and wolves in national parks in North America, including Yellowstone, leads “to an increase in browsing animals such as deer and elk. More browsing disrupts vegetation, shifts birds and small mammals and changes other parts of the ecosystem in a widespread cascade of impacts,” according to a summary of the findings.

In some areas of Africa, a plummet in lion and leopard populations has led to an increase in olive baboons, which take a toll on human crops and livestock, the scientists find.

The scientists—who hail from Australia, Italy, Sweden, and the United States—document similar effects across the globe.

“Human tolerance of these species is a major issue for conservation,” Ripple said. “We say these animals have an intrinsic right to exist, but they are also providing economic and ecological services that people value.”

First, a reminder to hunters who might happen upon this blog: please don’t bother commenting in support of your sport. Pro-hunting comments don’t get posted here. There are plenty of other forums for that sort of thing. Though your arguments may be “heartfelt” and well thought out, all pro-kill comments end up in the round file. Readers here have heard you sportsmen’s rationalizations ad nauseum and instinctively know the truth about hunting. Anyone wanting to hear hunter rationalizations can visit any number of sites dedicated to the disemination of hunter propaganda–this is not one of them.

__________________________________

Now back to today’s sermon:

In a recent discussion on wildlife issues with some longtime friends, I felt a little out of place to learn they were all against the reintroduction of wolves to places like Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. No, they weren’t a group of hunters selfishly seeking authority over nonhuman life; these good folks were understandably upset because the wolves are being killed in horrible ways, ever since their removal from the federal endangered species list left them at the mercy of state game department policy makers. While I share their outrage and the urge to end the suffering of wolves, I have to argue that at least the ones “that got away” will go on to fill a gap in biodiversity.

The point of recovering endangered species should be to bring back and/or protect enough diversity to allow nature to function apart from human intervention. The presence of predators like wolves can help to restore a sense of natural order and nullify the claims by hunters that their sport is necessary to keep ungulate populations in check.

Wolves in Yellowstone have been keeping elk on the move enough to allow willows to thrive once again in places like the Lamar Valley. Newly emerging willow thickets in turn provide food and shelter for an array of species, from beavers to songbirds. The loss of each thread of biodiversity brings us one step closer to a mass extinction spasm that would wreak more destruction and animal suffering than the Earth has seen in some 50 million years.

Hunters want their cake and eat it too. Out of one side of their mouth they declare that there are too many elk and that they do the animals a favor by killing them to prevent overgrazing. Yet when wolves spread out and successfully reclaim some of their former territories, hunters resent the competition and call for every brutal tactic imaginable to drive wolves back into the shadows, thereby restoring the imbalance that hunters depend on to justify their exploits.

Now more than ever we need to counter the hunter agenda at every turn, for the sake of a functioning planet. It’s high time to put an end to the notion that wildlife are “property” of the states, to be “managed” as they see fit. The animals of the Earth are autonomous, each having a necessary role in nature. Only human arrogance would suppose it any other way.

Okay, I know what you’re saying to yourself: “Wait…what?” “WTF?” “Wildlife doesn’t need a manager!” “What the hell was he thinking?!”

Clearly, I didn’t know what I was getting into. I knew I loved animals and wanted to work around wildlife, but what I didn’t realize was that about the only work in that field was in some game department promoting hunting, or in the vile Wildlife “Services” department, killing off animals by the droves in horrible ways.

I had enrolled in a small, rural college where the same teacher taught every class in the wildlife curriculum. In an obvious plug for the local logging industry, he started off each class (no matter which course he was teaching) with the mantra, “Clear cuts are good for wildlife,” at which point I would raise my hand and ask, “What about wolves or wolverine or grizzly bears who prefer wilderness and try to avoid people whenever possible?” To that he would rephrase his spiel and say, “Clear cuts are good for deer.”

It didn’t take long before I realized that wildlife “management” had an agenda, a higher purpose—to serve the hunting industry. Not, as I had imagined, to serve wildlife or to promote the balance of nature. No, quite the opposite, in fact.

Although it had been well established by then that the way to ensure healthy populations of ungulates was to maintain healthy populations of natural predators, “game” managers continued to make the same mistake that Aldo Leopold, known as the father of wildlife management, made in 1926. In a Sand County Almanac, Leopold reveals a regrettable experience that many people still haven’t learned from:

“We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock.

“In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy…When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable side-rocks. We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”

Unfortunately, Aldo Leopold’s eventual understanding of wolves’ necessary place in a healthy ecosystem came too late for at least one New Mexico pack. Judging by the vehemence with which today’s hunters are targeting wolves, it’s plain to see that wildlife management still hasn’t come very far in its grasp of nature’s mechanisms.

Richard Leaky, author of The Sixth Extinction, points to the folly of trying to manage wildlife, “It is far better to understand and accept the world of nature in its infinite variety and its infinitely complex processes, acknowledging the near futility of attempts to control them, than to imagine through ignorance that it is possible to do so.”